The bags are packed. The cab comes at 6:00 tomorrow morning and we’ll be on our way to New Zealand. There’s not likely to be much activity here for the next two weeks. Those of you who are also done, enjoy your time off. Talk to you in a couple weeks.
In May, before the bar study craziness got out of control, I went out to take some pictures. Here are a couple of my favorites from the trip.
In particular, I was trying out the new 300mm lens my father got me for graduation. So far, I love it.
The flower picture I could have gotten with another lens (since flowers don’t typically move very far), but as it happens, I took it from about 30 feet away sitting on a bench. The chipmunk would have been much more difficult without the lens.
I’m looking forward to having some more time to play with it now that you-know-what is behind me. It is, of course, coming to New Zealand with us on Sunday.
Since lots of people are still coming here based on MBE searches, and since I didn’t have Internet last night, I’ll back up a little and talk about that briefly.
The first half seemed perfectly normal and as expected. At the break, my friends and I all felt well-prepared and unsurprised. And then the second half came. Full of very bizarre questions, including one that essentially asked me to talk about the relationship between two terms, neither of which I knew. I eliminated one option as being asinine and then looked around for a 3-sided coin. Failing to find one, I picked C. For Clueless.
OK. Now I’m going to do my best to forget everything specific about the exam. No more blogging about its particulars. Instead: frolic.
A ridiculously long three days, but it’s over now. First thing I did when I got home was hide all the BarBRI materials upstairs. That was about the limit of my competence at this point. I’m just hoping I can stay awake long enough to celebrate.
Tomorrow is devoted to being in a vegetative state. Saturday’s for packing. We leave first thing Sunday AM.
Congratulations to everyone who’s done.
One day down. And (at least I think) the hardest of them. Though these were not the topics I would have asked for (there was no Civ Pro and almost no Evidence), I think it went pretty well. They happened to pick tax and family issues that I actually knew. There was even a point of law from the list of things-I-habitually-screw-up that I’ve been carrying around for the last few weeks. I thought “That’s on my list” and, in fact, I remembered the relevant point of law. Now I can forget everything I learned about PA law.
It’s so much better to actually be taking the test than studying for it. But I’m really tired. I just hope I can hold my head upright on Thursday. Drooling on the exam papers wouldn’t do much to get the bar examiners on my side.
Good luck to all taking the MBE tomorrow!
I’ve never been a study-up-to-the-last-minute kind of student, so today is instead devoted to keeping myself from freaking out. I know enough law to pass; I just need to be in a sufficiently functional frame of mind to get it out on paper. Even if I wanted to study today, I’m too wired. Yesterday I found myself unable to sit still to watch television. So some calming is in order.
With that in mind, today has been spent doing really important things like making a playlist to get me to and from the various exam and hotel sites. I spent much of the morning chatting with friends who are fortunate enough not to be taking the bar exam at the moment. I went to our favorite lunch place. I went to the library to check out frivolous reading. And in a couple hours, I can start making dinner. Pretty much, it’s all about keeping myself distracted for the next 18 hours and change.
This post is of absolutely no use to those taking the bar this year, but it’s been on my mind.
Many people told me during law school not to take classes just because they were on the bar. Basically I think that’s sound advice. I didn’t take Fed Tax or Family Law and I have no regrets about that.
If, however, I hadn’t taken Evidence and, to a lesser extent, Crim Pro, that’d be a problem. So my advice: don’t take anything just ’cause it’s on the bar, except Evidence and some course that deals with the Fourth Amendment.
If I fail because I screw up a Family Law or Fed Tax question, I promise to return and modify this post.
These quotes pretty well sum up how I’m feeling right now. I’m midway through a final practice MBE. Then I’ve got 3 days of trying to get those things that have inadvertantly fallen out of my brain back in before they matter. It will all be over soon, thank God.
I saw an excellent t-shirt on my way in today:
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who know binary and those who don’t.
Makes me sort of nostalgic for my computer geek days. Or maybe it’s just that I’m studying for the bar.
Someone got to my site yesterday googling for answers to the july 2006 mbe. If only.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve rapidly lost the ability to talk and/or think about anything not bar-related. This is, of course, a topic that is considerably less interesting to everyone I know (fellow bar-studiers excepted, of course) than it is to me. And it’s not really all that interesting to me anymore. The result is that my conversations with non-bar-studiers tend to be really short.
We went to dinner with a couple friends of ours last night, which was nice. I could have the standard 3-minute conversation on the bar exam that is my stock-in-trade at this point, and then I could watch while everyone else talked about other things. It was pleasantly diverting and I didn’t feel like I was dragging the conversation towards tediousness.
One of the lecturers in the simulated MBE review pointed out that people tend to miss multiple choice questions in bunches. He suggested that, when you sense that you’re losing focus, you stop for a moment to catch your breath and get mentally organized again.
Sound advice. I was doing a set of practice questions today and noticed that I wasn’t concentrating. I stopped, stretched for a moment, and reminded myself to pay attention. When I went back to score myself, I’d just gotten 3 wrong at that point and after I stopped, I got 5 of the next 6 right.
I’ve noticed that the number of questions I miss because I don’t know the law is going down. But I really have to get a handle on the questions I miss even though I know the law. I think I probably know enough law to pass at this point, but there’s not leeway to miss questions I know the answers to. That’s just dumb.
No matter how confused any of us may be about the elements of defamation, I’m pretty sure we’re not as confused as this guy (courtesy of the Stella Awards, named in honor of the original McDonalds coffee plaintiff). Mr. Heckard is suing Michael Jordan (and Phil Knight, on an even more convoluted theory) for defamation on the grounds that people are constantly mistaking him for Jordan. He filed his suit pro se because, apparently, he couldn’t get a lawyer to take his case. He’s requesting compensatory damages of $52 million and punitive damages of $364 million (no indication on how he arrived at those figures) from each defendant. I wonder if he’d settle for an autographed pair of sneakers.
I’m studying for both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey bar exams, which provides lots of opportunity for comparing the procedures in the two states (and generally leads to griping about New Jersey). Today’s rant: released essay questions and answers. When PA releases old essay questions, they release a detailed statement of the examiner (listing all the law that’s relevant complete with citations), a grading checklist (listing items that examinees are expected to discuss and the points allotted for each issue), and a sample passing student answer. I couldn’t ask for more. In New Jersey, by contrast, they release only a student answer. These answers are, of course, frequently incorrect about minor (and in some cases, major) points. So they’re pretty much useless for grading yourself (beyond making sure you spotted all the major issues). The only upside is realizing that the authors of all these answers passed the exam.
I’ve been eager to read this ever since I heard Linda Greenhouse speak earlier this year. I wasn’t disappointed. This book succeeds because of the combination of Greenhouse’s unparalleled ability to write about the complex issues before the court in a way that’s easy to understand and the amazing resource that Justice Harry Blackmun left to the Library of Congress when he died.
Blackmun seems to have kept every piece of paper that ever passed through his office. The collection includes everything from drafts of opinions (both Blackmun’s and those circulated by the other justices) to the notes that the justices pass back and forth across the bench during oral arguments. Greenhouse uses them to create a fascinating portrait both of the Court and of Justice Blackmun himself. And she does it, as she generally does in the New York Times, without getting in the way of the story.
This book gives at least as much insight into the workings of the Court as Edward Lazarus’ Closed Chambers without the sense of airing dirty laundry that I got from that book. Certainly there’s dirty laundry here, but there’s nothing sensational about the way Greenhouse portrays it and, unlike Lazarus, she doesn’t seem to be seeking out the dark side of the Court’s operation.
The book has enough detail so that, as someone with legal training, I don’t feel like the story’s been dumbed down, but it’s not so full of legal minutiae as to make it only interesting to lawyers. In short, Greenhouse displays the same skill at being clear without being simplistic that has made her such an excellent Supreme Court correspondant for so many years.
